"Ratatouille" topper / THU 12-18-25 / "Colorful" Atlantic Coast Conference team / "Severance" actress Tullock / Mushroom in ramen / Knockoff version of a bejeweled Imperial egg, e.g. / Reveal private data of, in modern lingo / Follow-up to an oath / ___ Nation (activist organization since 1990) / Name that sounds like a computer guidebook / Jake's love in "The Sun Also Rises"

Constructor: Joseph Gangi

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: QQs — in four phrases, parts of words that sound like "cues" are replaced with two "Q"s

Theme answers:

• DARING RESQQS (17A: Feats performed on knights' quests)
• SYRAQQ ORANGE (29A: "Colorful" Atlantic Coast Conference team)
• "EXQQ MY FRENCH" (44A: Follow-up to an oath)
• UNJUSTLY AQQ (57A: Point at the wrong person)

Word of the Day: QUEER Nation (30D: ___ Nation (activist organization since 1990)) —

Queer Nation is an LGBTQ activist organization founded in March 1990 in New York City, by HIV/AIDS activists from ACT UP. The four founders were outraged at the escalation of anti-gay violence on the streets and prejudice in the arts and media. The group is known for its confrontational tactics and its slogans. (wikipedia)

• • •

The concept here is fine. It's a gimmick type I've seen before, where words or parts of words are represented in the grid by letters that sound the same. Syracuse is just an hour away from me, so I picked the theme up pretty quickly when SYRACUSE ORANGE(MEN) wouldn't fit and the crosses for the "CUSE" in SYRACUSE wouldn't work. I thought I understood the theme here:

But as you can see, I'd only understood the half of it. It was only when I had trouble parsing the answer for 10D: Spirits (LIQUORS) that I finally saw the theme in all its "Q"-ness. Saved by LIQUOR(S)! Gonna have a cocktail tonight to celebrate (who am I kidding, I was gonna have a cocktail anyway). 

I was enjoying the puzzle just fine, but then a spate of jarring things happened toward the end that left me with more of a meh feeling. The first and most jarring thing was "EXQQS MY FRENCH." I've only ever heard this phrase as "Pardon my French." It just rolls off the tongue that way. "Excuse" feels oddly formal(er) and just doesn't have the colloquial currency that "Pardon" does. Wikipedia lists the "Excuse" version as a normal alternative version, but it sure wasn't normal to my ear. "Excuse my French" appears to be the older version, but the only version I've ever known (which apparently dates from the '30s, and "may be a result of soldiers returning from the First World War" (wikipedia)) is "Pardon my French." Google returns ~2.2 million hits for ["Pardon my French"] and ~1.5 million for ["Excuse my French"], which isn't that noteworthy of a gap, actually. I suppose it's a real phrase. It just did not feel that way to my ears. 

Also bad on my ears: EMANUEL, as clued (42D: Name that sounds like a computer guidebook). First of all, if you can't find a real person for your name clue, consider that maybe you shouldn't use it at all. But if you are going to do this "sounds like" thing, make sure the sounds ... match. I pronounce EMANUEL and this hypothetical E-MANUAL really, really differently. At least I assume it's "E-MANUAL" I'm supposed to be imagining, and not simply "a manual." Why else specify "computer?" Anyway, E-MANUAL requires you to stress that "E," hard. And it's a long "E" too. The sound and rhythm of the word is simply not like EMANUEL at all. 

And then there's CUE—why is CUE in this puzzle that is all about replacing "Q"s? You gotta expunge all Q/"cue" business from the rest of your grid if your theme is based entirely on Q/"cue" business. So strange to have an un-"Q"'d CUE just sitting there. Like a fly in your oatmeal. Lastly, on the significant complaint list, is FAUXBERGÉ, which had me literally groaning and saying "noooo..." as I wrote it in (33D: Knockoff version of a bejeweled Imperial egg, e.g.). This is such a one-off, made-up, stupid "word," and the clue ... what is with the "e.g."?? Does Fabergé make things other than eggs, and are there knockoffs of those, and do people call those FAUXBERGÉ? I'm all for doing funny things with words—neologisms, portmanteaux, whatever—but this felt like an answer trying to be superfancy but stepping on its gown mid-twirl and falling on its face. If you're going to introduce a new word to the crossword, make it one that has some currency. Something I can use, or at least feel good knowing. "Nowadays, the term is a part of the expertise vocabulary in the field of Fabergé" (wikipedia). Which means how many people use it then? Like, six?

Otherwise, I thought this puzzle was just fine. Mildly clever. Not hard enough, but puzzles never are any more. Hardest part (as usual) was getting started. I fumbled more than usual in the NW, as I went through not 1 not 2 but 3 bad answers, starting with "YAY, US!" for 1A: "We're the best!," e.g. (BOAST). Just didn't process that "e.g." bit and went for a parallel phrase. A little later, I thought that [Some queens] were BEES (not a surprising mistake at all), and maybe a little before that, I wanted AIR tight instead of SIT tight (20A: ___ tight). I also forgot what a "piste" is. It's a word I've only ever seen in crossword clues, along with its skiing-related cousin, "schuss." Hey, did you know that Schuss, "a one-legged humanoid skiier with a large red and white head," was "the unofficial Olympic mascot of the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France" (wikipedia)? Here he is gliding down a piste, presumably:

I've never actually read The Sun Also Rises so BRETT (38A: Jake's love in "The Sun Also Rises") was a mystery today, as was JEN Tullock (59D: "Severance" actress Tullock). I thought DOX had two "X"s, but apparently, as with Pardon v. Excuse, there are two ways to do it (36A: Reveal private data of, in modern lingo). The double-X one just looks cooler. See also "Anti-vaxxers." I think the double-X makes it seem more sinister. Wasn't sure if Kermit was a HI-YO or a HI-HO. The former reads Lone Ranger, the latter Seven Dwarves. I never really thought about the expression that Kermit's using. HI-HO sounds right.

Bullets:

• 14A: Mushroom in ramen (ENOKI) — fungi's gift to crosswords. The premium crossword mushroom. You'd think MOREL would be more common, given its more common letters, and over the long history of the puzzle, it's true—there are more MORELs. But in the Modern Era (i.e. since Shortz), ENOKI actually has MOREL beat by a handful of appearances. ENOKI didn't appear in the crossword at all until 2006 (!), whereas MOREL's been trudging along as a crossword answer since 1945. Maleska really loved MOREL—six appearances in 1987. Don't say I never taught you anything!
• 56A: Off-line, online (IRL) — a nice sing-songy clue that is also perfectly accurate. "IRL" = "in real life—a very handy initialism for a world where so much human interaction takes place digitally.
• 51D: "Ratatouille" topper (TOQUE) — got this off the "T." I don't know if I learned this word from crosswords, but it feels like I did. Pretty popular as "Q"-containing words go (29 appearances in the Modern Era, and 46 before that).

Time for more 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 now! Note: PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME ANY MORE PET PICS, I'M ALL FULL UP FOR THIS YEAR, thank you.

Here's Clancy, caught in the act. "I'm innocent! The tinsel attacked me!" Likely story, Clancy.

[Thanks, Ginny!]

Here's Gandalf, working security. No, you may not shake your present. Come back next week. That's right, keep moving.

[Thanks, Lily and Lizzie!]

Here's a rare sighting of the stealthy OrangeKat (RIP). One of the most ferocious of Holiday-time predators, OrangeKat was believed to be responsible for the deaths of scores of Christmas tree ornaments.

[Thanks, Barbara!]

Here's Doug the Bear Chow Chow, coming home after yet another failed mall reindeer audition. Someday, Doug will be Blitzen! Doug just knows it. Sadly, Doug can't be trusted to know much of anything. "One of the least intelligent animals I've ever met," says his owner. "That's probably why we all love him so much." 

[Thanks, Sam!]

This is Tom and Jerry. Do you think Jerry's mad that he got the mouse name? He looks kinda mad.

[Thanks, Vay!]

And lastly today, look at this giant sweet baby! This is Berk, 145 pounds of holiday love. Berk is a Kangal Dog rescue. Kangals are originally Turkish but have been exported to parts of Africa to defend local livestock herds from cheetah, thus helping preserve endangered cheetah populations (who would otherwise be killed by farmers). Berk could definitely fight a cheetah. He just doesn't feel like it right now. 

[Thanks, Karen!]

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Big name in chicken or boxing / WED 12-17-25 / Centerpiece of "The Hobbit" / Group of grumps sitting around kvetching? / Just about anything on a string / What makes a stud become studious? / 1990s comedy inspired by "Emma" / Gary's ___ Towne Tavern (rival bar on "Cheers")

Constructor: Gary Larson and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: SPELL IT OUT (60A: Painstakingly explain something ... or a hint to 17-, 26- and 45-Across) — familiar phrases where "IT" has been changed to "OUT," creating wacky phrases:

Theme answers:

• POUTY PARTY (17A: Group of grumps sitting around kvetching?) (from "pity party")
• CHAMPS AT THE BOUT (26A: Ali vs. Frazier, e.g.?) (from "champs [not chomps] at the bit")
• SPOUT IN THE OCEAN (45A: Welcome sight on a whale-watching cruise?) (from "Spit in the Ocean")

Word of the Day: "Spit in the Ocean" (see 45A) —

: poker in which each player is dealt a hand of cards facedown and combines them with cards faceup on the table to make a poker hand

specifically : a game in which each player is dealt four cards, a fifth card is faced on the take, and the faced card and all others of the same rank are wild

• • •

Normally a big fan of Doug's puzzles, but this one didn't quite get over the hump for me. Is that even an expression? "Get over the hump"? It felt right in my head, but it looks wrong in the light of day. But back to the puzzle—the theme here isn't as funny as I'd want a Wacky Puzzle to be. Somehow I'd expect the "IT"-to-"OUT" answers to pack more punch, or to be much, much wackier. The winner today is CHAMPS AT THE BOUT, I think, though champs simply *being* at the bout doesn't make for the liveliest of images. The other two are shrugs. They fit the bill, they follow directions, but the resulting wackiness just isn't Big enough. All of the base phrases today feel a little old-fashioned. Part of this is because I haven't played (and haven't really heard the term) Spit in the Ocean since I was a teenager (in the OLDE days, when Cheers was still on the air). I also can't remember the last time I heard "pity party." "Champs at the bit" is current enough, I guess. Or maybe timeless—though it was probably a more resonant saying when the culture was more horse-oriented (both transportation-wise and sports spectatorship-wise). Horse-racing was the most popular thing in the sports pages besides boxing and baseball in the early part of the 20th century, and while all those sports have fallen in popularity in recent years, horse-racing has arguably fallen the most. This has nothing to do with the quality of CHAMPS AT THE BOUT as a theme answer. I'm just trying to figure out why the themers are giving off a mild yesteryear vibe. References to Cheers and Clueless and Get Smart also fix this puzzle's center of gravity firmly in the last century. It was a perfectly good century, so I'm not mad, but the puzzle just felt like it lacked a certain currency and vibrancy.

The fill wasn't helping brighten things up much. The grid is dominated by what are essentially nine sections of 3-4-5s—three across the top, center, and bottom. Hard to squeeze a lot of excitement out of so much short stuff, and today's short stuff tends to OOZE rather than sparkle, shine, or some other more energetic word. There's nothing really bad about it. It's just deadening in its familiarness. Another day, another UBOAT, another OBOE, another [choke, gag] SESH. Maybe the idea was to make the fill as simple as possible so that people wouldn't have such a hard time working out the wacky themers. On the whole, I wanted this one to try harder. Sometimes I do a themed puzzle and I think "whoa, whoa, easy, you're Trying Too Hard!" (TTH™). But this feels like not trying hard enough. Were these the best IT-to-OUT options available? Could the fill not have been brought closer to a boil? The puzzle is best in the longer non-theme answers, which is often the case. Today's are solid, but there are only four of them (TRUE-TO-LIFE SUBURBAN in the NE, CLUELESS APOLOGIZED in the SW). Six letters is what passes for a "longish" answer in this puzzle, but there are also only four of those. So this puzzle feels like a placeholder. It's puzzle-shaped, it ticks all the essential boxes for crossword puzzleness, but it's not giving me anything special. Again, it doesn't seem to be really trying.


Weirdly wanted UPDOS at 1A: Lock combinations? (COIFS), only to have it appear a few seconds later (in singular form) at 24D: Red carpet hairstyle, perhaps (UPDO). I would never have guessed that Yamaha made OBOEs if I hadn't had that "B" in place. With the "B" in place, it was pretty obvious. They make pianos (and probably other instruments), why not OBOEs? I don't think I got held up much anywhere today. I thought the [Centerpiece of "The Hobbit"] (QUEST) was the SHIRE, so that slowed me down a bit. I had HAM IT (bad) before HAM UP (better) (27D: Overplay for the audience). REPEL took me a while because I can't really imagine how [Throw off] works as a clue. I suppose if you literally throw someone off of you, you REPEL them (?), but "Throw off" usually suggests "mislead," or else you could "throw off" the (hopefully metaphorical) chains that bind you, but even then, REPEL isn't really the right synonym. The "Throw off" / REPEL equivalency eluded me today. I also had no idea that HYATT was "H" on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), so I just waited for crosses there. The only real challenge in the puzzle involved working out the themers, which is pretty typical for a Wednesday, now that I think about it.

Bullets:

• 15A: Turner of old movies (LANA) — not my favorite actress, but a fine one. She's in several movies I really love, namely The Postman Always Rings Twice (with John Garfield) (1946) and The Bad and the Beautiful (with Kirk Douglas) (1952). She's also in one of my favorite poems. From one of my favorite collections (Lunch Poems (1964)), this is Frank O'Hara's "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)": 

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
lana turner has collapsed!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

(poetryfoundation dot org) 

• 3D: What makes a stud become studious? (IOUS) — it also makes Ted tedious. I don't know why you'd turn a perfectly good (or at least recognizable) word (IOUS) into a mere string of letters. Cluing IOUS this way feels awful, but it is also probably more interesting than anything you were apt to get from the more conventional stock of IOU clues. There's something perverse about this clue that I half-admire. To its credit, unlike much of the puzzle, this clue actually does seem to be trying.
• 42D: Suffix with beat or neat (NIK) — look, you get one suffix per puzzle and this puzzle decided to blow it on IOUS, so NIK is even more unwelcome than usual today.
• 25D: Jost's longtime "Weekend Update" co-anchor (CHE) — I have not been an SNL watcher for a long time, so I'm not that familiar with the Jost/CHE incarnation of "Weekend Update," but I'm more familiar with Michael CHE today than I was yesterday at this time because yesterday I listened to the latest episode of comedian Mike Birbiglia's podcast "Working It Out," and CHE was the featured guest. It's a funny and illuminating interview, esp. if you are at all into comedy. I like Birbiglia's interviews with other comedians because while they're funny (as you'd expect/hope) they can be charmingly earnest and frequently really technical—like, in-the-weeds stuff about composing jokes and working on material etc. Lots of good stuff about the creative process. Anyway, this talk with CHE is cool.

• 26D: Food you might eat wearing a bib (CRABS) — the "food" is CRAB. The countable creatures are CRABS. Something about the plural here felt weird (given the clue). Personally, I'd rather see CRAGS / GULL than CRABS / BULL. CRAGS has the advantage of not being another name for pubic lice. 
• 38D: 1990s comedy inspired by "Emma" (CLUELESS) — happy birthday to Jane Austen, who turned the big 2-5-0 just yesterday!
• 47D: Just about anything on a string (CAT TOY) — loved this clue, mostly because I had no idea what it could possibly be until I got enough crosses, and then I saw it and thought "oh yeah, that's true." But honestly, you don't need to put anything actually on the string. The one object in the house that my cat Alfie is most obsessed with is a simple piece of string (twine, really) that we keep in a kitchen drawer. He knows the sound of the drawer. If you even stand near the drawer for more than a few seconds, he comes trotting over. You can drag the string around and make him chase it, but you can also just put it down and he'll just happily drag it around the house. The whole CAT TOY industry is unnecessary. This goes for CAT BEDs as well. Ida sleeps happily in the cardboard container that her cat litter came in. Often there's a comfy blanket nearby, but nope, box wins.

Speaking of pets, it's time for 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 now. Note: PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME ANY MORE PET PICS, I'M ALL FULL UP FOR THIS YEAR, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

 

This is Nimbus. What did I tell you about cats and boxes?! 

[Thanks, Uday!]

Here are Caroline and Nina. Add a wreath and voilà, instant "holiday" spirit. I am told that Caroline and Nina are "torbies," which is (allegedly) a mash-up of "tortoise shell" and "tabby." One of these cats seems happy with this sleeping arrangement. The other seems ... unsure. She might be leaving soon. Or hatching a plot for blanket dominance, we'll never know.

[Thanks, Mac!]

Here are Juno (lab), Stella (sweater), and Laila (crazy eyes) doing their best Three Magi imitation. "O Come Let Us Adore Him*" (*dog treats)

[Thanks, Theresa!]

Giulia and Piper hear reindeer on the roof! (this is how I've chosen to make sense of this as a "Holiday" picture):

[Thanks, Marilee!]

Lastly, a pair of opposing pet personalities from Monica. First, there's the diffident GIULIA, who would prefer not to be part of whatever "Holiday" photo scheme you've got cooked up. You may take her picture from there, but do not come closer.

And then there's dopey Duke, who will do whatever you want, sure, antlers, whatever, just tell him he's a good boy!

[Thanks, Monica!]

That's it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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